TOW #16 - (IRB Post) Nickel and Dimed

As the snow’s piling down in front of my house and I’m lying down inside of my warm blanket right now, Nickel and Dimed shows me the working conditions of the low-wage workers that prohibit people from getting the commodities that I’m fortunate to have during this weather and basically, anytime else. Barbara Ehrenreich, after working low-paying jobs to experience what it’s like to live minimum wage, realizes firsthand the uncountable issues and problems one encounters when working many hours for little money. She sheds light on the different layers of problems that surround the low wage working environment through her usage of facts and figures and disproving common misconceptions.

After she experienced firsthand of what it was like to earn a low wage while working in different cities in America, she recorded her income and necessary prices she had to pay, then compared them with numbers of the average working class and what was needed for them to survive. She recounts, “In Key West, I earned $1039 in one month and spent $517 on food, gas, toiletries, and laundry. Rent was the deal breaker…my move to the trailer park …made me responsible for $625 a month in rent alone, utilities not included” (Ehrenreich 197). By listing such figures, she establishes logos and shows the severity of the problem, which she wraps by saying, “Something is wrong, very wrong, when a single person in good health…can barely support herself by the sweat of her brow. You don’t need a degree in economics to see that wages are too low and rents to high” (199). She shows that there are many things one must pay for in order to sustain a stable life, and that’s simply impossible. By proving this through her numbers, the reader can understand that this is a problem that needs to be fixed.

Besides using numbers, Ehrenreich also lists and challenges common misconceptions people have about poverty or the minimum wage situation. Many people, including Ehrenreich, “…grow up hearing over and over, to the point of tedium, that ‘hard work’ was the secret of success…No one ever said that you could work hard – harder even than you ever thought possible – and still find yourself sinking ever deeper into poverty and debt” (220). Many people grow up hearing this idea, so it becomes eye-opening when Ehrenreich strikes it down as false. It forces readers to abandon the idea they’ve been drilled to think with and look from the perspective of the minimum wage, where hard work is not the only factor, and it is not the workers' fault that they are in the situation that they are in.

Ehrenreich, by putting herself in the shoes of the working class, puts the readers into the shoes of the working class, where the minimum wage situation is more than what privileged people think they are. Her calculated numbers and arguments that strike down the myths of minimum wage forces readers to consider the truth and the different things that are caused by situations we could not possibly imagine.